Meteor Real Time Web Made Easy

Rachel Willmer

June 2014

What I’m going to cover

Why Meteor interests meHow it worksLive demoProblemsGood stuff

Rachel WillmerFounder & CEO, Luzme

I created the world’s first (and best, IMHO) ebook search site, Luzme.

I’ve spoken at technical and business events: FutureBook, PyCon UK & IE, Edinburgh “Disruption in Publishing”.

Luzme has been featured in TechCrunch, LifeHacker and BoingBoing.

I like improvising with new technologies and business disruption.

Why Do I Care?

• I’m lazy• I’m impatient• I want to Get Stuff Done

• And I need real time data

Timeout:show the problem in my current site

Aye, but what is Meteor?

…and how does it work?

Meteor: the headlines

• Real-time web application framework• Javascript on client and server• Spacebars templating language• MongoDB on server• MiniMongo on client• Pub/Sub built in to framework• Its release was the largest in Hacker New history (says

Wikipedia)• One of the most starred GitHub repos• and…

Backed by Big Money and People

• Raised $11m in 2012, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners

• Also in the round: Maynard Webb (board of Yahoo and Salesforce), Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), James Lindenbaum (helped start Heroku), Dustin Moskovitz (helped start Facebook), Alexis Ohanian (helped start Reddit), Ron Conway, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba and Y Combinator

And now the code

(won’t take long, it’s less than 100 lines)

And here’s the downside

• Not Yet 1.0• Infrastructure not completely in place• Meteor.com documentation hard• No standard testing framework• Issues to do with existing mongodb _ids• Issues to do with hooking up to existing Django user

authentication

But…

It’s Not That Bad

• Buy “Discover Meteor” for getting started• Testing is under heavy discussion, there

will be a unified approach RSN• Not far from 1.0

…and..

The Good Stuff

• Great community• Can use npm modules• Atmosphere : user-contributed modules• Oplog tailing = more efficient than poll’n’diff• Fast prototyping (auto refresh on code

change)• Can use in PhoneGap apps (apparently)• Infrastructure coming: Modulus.io or Heroku for hosting;

MongoHQ for mongodb; Kadira for monitoring

TL;DR

• It’s awesome! (and good fun to play with)

https://www.meteor.com/https://www.discovermeteor.com/

http://atmospherejs.com/

• Ask me for a discount code for the “Discover Meteor” book…

QUESTIONS?

Rachel Willmerrachel@willmer.org

@rwillmer

http://luzme.comhttp://infiniteshelfspace.com

This presentation is available athttp://slideshare.net/rwillmer